The Year in Race Relations: Protests as rebuke of system gone awry

The nationwide surge of street protests this year over white police officers killing unarmed black men signaled more than their denunciation of personal police prejudice. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” marches, the many die-ins for Eric Garner, the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown youth picture feeds and the other powerful images of black and brown people on the streets demanding their rights showed a profound rebuke of a political system increasingly beholden to a tiny group of wealthy — and mostly white — donors.

Those protesters declared their lack of confidence in America’s political and legal institutions to deliver justice to its citizens — a challenge that will likely grow in 2015.

And their grievances are more closely connected to the roughly $4 billion spent on this year’s elections — by far the most expensive midterms ever — than is obvious at first glance.

“The donor class as a whole and campaign contributors specifically are overwhelmingly white,” says a new report by Demos, a New York–based public policy institution. The report explores how donor and corporate interests differ dramatically from the political interests of working families. And policy driven by wealthy donor interests disproportionately harms people of color, a larger percentage of whom are poor and working class. The interests and experiences of black and Latino communities are severely underrepresented in the donor class that increasingly sets the U.S. political agenda.

The political voice to which U.S. legislators are most responsive does not come from towns like Ferguson, Missouri. And in a political system in which the power of a handful of donors increasingly outstrips the power of ordinary voters, it has become far more difficult for people of color to assert their interests through traditional political means. That leaves them less able to challenge — and therefore more vulnerable to — wage deflation, militarized policing, mass incarceration and mass deportation. As officials elected with the strong backing of wealthy white elites pass laws designed to suppress turnout by poor black and Latino voters, the political disempowerment of people of color becomes cyclical.

And so they hit the streets and social media. The absence of meaningful campaign finance reform has left many black and Latino people to see protests in the street as a more effective way of defending their interests than a political system more responsive to donors than to voters. Black and brown protesters are extending the meaning of citizenship beyond the ballot box and the donation form through creative civil disobedience. This reboot of democracy that flourished over the past year is likely to continue in 2015.

Other examples of creative civil disobedience cropped up this year — fast-food and Walmart worker protests, immigration protests and civil disobedience by undocumented Dreamers — suggesting that the issues driving street politics will extend beyond police reform to include immigrant rights and the minimum wage.

On all of those issues, the citizens of the street will battle entrenched interests in the political system. Vehement opponents of raising the minimum wage are poised to continue their fight. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association, for example, spent more than $91 million lobbying Congress in 2013.

More than 70 percent of Americans surveyed support raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour. When asked whether they supported a national minimum wage high enough so that a family with one full-time worker would not live in poverty, only 40 percent of respondents with an average income over $1 million supported the move, compared with nearly 80 percent of the general public. The track record suggests the new Congress will prioritize the policy preferences of the donor class and will seek to shape the public conversation by insisting that a minimum-wage hike would cost jobs. 

Proponents of a minimum-wage hike cite evidence-based counterarguments, backed by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, demonstrating that raising the federal minimum would actually boost the economy and create jobs by raising consumer demand.

The U.S. can expect the coming year to bring more direct action from black and Latino communities to make their voices heard in the corridors of power in order to combat the ability of political contributions to settle policy disputes in the donors’ favor.

While addressing grievances such as police brutality, immigrant abuse and low wages may not figure among the top priorities of Washington’s political class, policy solutions to those problems enjoy growing support among much of the U.S. public. And that could allow the black and Latino youths at the center of the 2014 protests to become a center of gravity in politics, finally positioning them with more leverage in shaping the political agenda ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Unlike the narrower agenda set by lobbyists on Capitol Hill, the democracy of the streets will enable a wider conversation on race, rights and bread-and-butter issues in America. Those are not simply issues of personal hostility between cops and young black men. They’re an invitation to a new American conversation about structural inequalities and about how to create a more robust democracy and economy in which all lives really matter.

Editor’s note: The author of this article works for Demos.